I am not saying the large number of African refugees working at a wind turbine plant brought any virus to North Dakota, but I think you can see the problem brewing in large plants that employ immigrants many of whom do not speak English and live in close-knit immigrant enclaves.
Testing held near North Dakota plant while virus cases climb
FARGO, N.D. (AP) — Health officials and National Guard members spent Thursday afternoon screening people for the coronavirus after eight positive tests were confirmed among workers at a North Dakota wind turbine plant that employs a large number of immigrants from African countries.
The drive-thru screenings outside the LM Wind Power in Grand Forks took place on a day when state officials reported a record number of new coronavirus cases for the second consecutive day. A total of 52 cases were confirmed in the last two days, including 28 on Thursday.
Cars were lined up in four lanes outside the LM plant, where officials administered 424 tests in five hours to people who may have come in close contact with the infected workers, said John Bernstrom, spokesman for the city of Grand Forks.
Shirley Dykshoorn
Shirley Dykshoorn, vice president at Lutheran Social Services in Fargo, the state’s refugee resettlement agency, said many of the employees are immigrants or former refugees who have worked at the plant for some time.
“Most of them have good English skills,” Dykshoorn said. “Maybe not as many in their family understand everything so we’ve tried to support them and help them with what they need going forward.”
Dr. Paul Carson, a public health and infectious disease specialist at North Dakota State University and adviser to the governor’s COVID-19 team, said he’s not surprised to see several cases pop up in a large plant. He said it’s important to aggressively pursue people who came in close contact with those who are infected.
“We’re going to find these little flare-ups and I think we should accept them. What we need to able to do is jump on them and try to prevent them from going any further,” Carson said. “We want to avoid what happened with the meat packing plant down in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.”
I had planned to post Neil Munro’s piece at Breitbartfrom a few days ago about problems in the meatpacking industry with the spread of the virus. See it here.
Over half of the more than 1,300 cases in South Dakota have been tied to an outbreak at a Smithfield pork processing plant in Sioux Falls.
The plant is one of the largest known clusters of COVID-19 cases in the country. A total of 598 employees have confirmed infections, plus 135 of their close contacts.
Sigh! Giant global corporations with a voracious appetite for immigrant labor changing the heartland one town at a time.
I’ve been writing about North Dakota for years and it was one of the states I visited during my 2016 road trip through the Midwest and West to see the impact of refugee labor on communities throughout middle America. See my North Dakota archive.
Rarely do we get any reports on how many citizens take time to contact elected officials about their unhappiness with the refugee admissions program.
Governor Little with Mr. Chobani Yogurt in Twin Falls. Twin Falls is number 10 in the top cities in the nation ‘welcoming’ refugees on a per capita basis.*** Any wonder why the governor jumped on the bandwagon for more refugees for Idaho.
So it was interesting to see that in Idaho citizens took action in a big way to criticize their Republican governor when he encouraged the US State Department to send Idaho more refugees and thus went against the President’s reform effort.
Unfortunately I can give you only a tiny snippet of this story as it is behind a paywall. Surely some Idahoans will subscribe to the Idaho Press for the whole story.
Records show opposition to refugees, Gov. Little’s work to support resettlement program
Gov. Brad Little’s decision to continue to allow refugee resettlement in Idaho wasn’t out of step with his colleagues elsewhere, writes Post Register reporter Nathan Brown. Nineteen Republican governors told the Trump administration in December and January they wanted to keep taking refugees, with just Texas Gov. Greg Abbott asking to opt out.
Not everyone was happy with it. Facebook comments and Twitter replies on Little’s accounts quickly filled with people angry at his decision, and hundreds of people contacted his office to express their displeasure.Documents provided in response to a public records request show both the scale of the blowback and his administration’s work to present facts to justify the governor’s decision.
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I reported here in Decemberthat Burleigh County commissioners held a couple of contentious meetings on the question of whether the county would continue receiving refugees under the President’s new reform plan.
Although their decision was not exactly overwhelming, the fact that this county commission actually held a hearing to take the pulse of the community is very significant. All across the country governors and local elected officials are deciding behind closed doors. Demand public hearings!
Lutheran Social Services recently reported to the commissioners that all was quiet and few refugees were arriving.
The headline from the Bismarck Tribunefocuses on that.
However, read on.
Commissioner Brian Bitner does something rarely seen when the subject of the financial impact refugees have on the community comes up—he called out Lutheran Social Services for providing deceptive information.
Commissioner Brian Bitner, who voted against refugee resettlement, on Wednesday criticized Lutheran Social Services for including information that he said wasn’t appropriate in its proposal to continue resettling refugees.
In its application to the county, Lutheran Social Services included a 2017-18 study from the state Legislature’s Human Services Committee that cited a report provided by New American Economy, a New York-based immigration research nonprofit, in a section on the “Benefits of Refugee Resettlement.” Despite the title, the section cited data on “New Americans” — a term that doesn’t mean just refugees.
Bloomberg’s big bucks buy glossy studies and the media falls for it!
This is Michael Bloomberg’s baby! He wants cheap labor for fat cats!
He and his cohorts have been spreading their Open Borders propaganda for ten years, so you can’t trust his numbers to begin with!
This is what the Left (and rich RINO Rs) do, they publish glossy studies and everyone, including the gullible media, never questions it.
It sure looks like one county commissioner isn’t fooled!
The Bismarck Tribune continues….
“Except where otherwise noted, we define an immigrant as anyone born outside the country to non-U.S. citizen parents who is a resident in the United States,” Nan Wu, New American Economy Deputy Director of Qualitative Research, said in an email about her group’s report. “This includes naturalized citizens, green card holders, temporary visa holders, refugees, asylees, and undocumented immigrants, among others. So refugees are included when we refer to “New Americans” or immigrants in the report.”
The section said “New Americans” in North Dakota paid $36.4 million in state and local taxes, $66.9 million in Social Security taxes and $16.2 million in Medicare taxes, and earned $559.6 million of income.
“The information regarding benefits of that was not information that was relative to refugees, it was information that was pertinent to foreign-born individuals,” Bitner said. “And so I (studied) the source of the information to find out it was census data that they used.”
He added: “And in the census data they were clear that it wasn’t possible to separate out any of the categories of immigration from that information. So the refugee information that was provided to us was not refugee information.”
This is an excellent opinion piece from Maine, a state we have extensively reported on here at RRW.
The writer very logically explains that before the state willy-nilly invites even more refugees and asylum seekers who supposedly would fill the needs of businesses looking for labor, more data is needed because right now it sure looks like Maine taxpayers are picking up the slack.
Maine Compass: Work permits for asylum applicants? Slow down
We need more data on how long it takes most refugees to make enough in wages to support their families without taxpayers’ help.
As more asylum seekers arrive in Portland, members of Maine’s congressional delegation want to accelerate work permits, pointing to labor shortages and taxpayer costs. But on a closer look, good reasons exist for continuing to require applicants to wait for work permits.
[….]
I believe that the labor benefit of employing asylum applicants is exaggerated, as court denial rates for West African applicants range from 40 percent to 50 percent, which suggests that almost half of Portland’s asylum seekers will eventually be denied and become potentially deportable. And of those who achieve refugee status, there are substantial costs.
Proof that the costs of refugee resettlement are shifted to states, while supposedly some financial benefits accrue at the federal level.
An internal study rejected by the Trump administration and leaked to The New York Times, “The Fiscal Costs of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program at the Federal, State, and Local Levels from 2005-2014,” provides important data for Maine’s representatives in Washington. The authors estimate that refugees and their dependents generated a $52.8 billion federal surplus but caused a net deficit at the state and local levels of $35.9 billion. Since the federal surplus would be shared nationwide, but the state and local deficits fall entirely on state and local governments, increasing the number of refugees in Maine would cost Maine taxpayers.
And the federal benefit? I imagine that the study’s computed federal benefit is inflated, as the impact of refugees on the high cost of national defense or federal debt was not included in this study — a surprising omission.
I suspect the enormous cost to our economy of remittances—money sent back to the home country—was never included either.
Christian continues….
Refugee costs shouldn’t surprise us. Moving to a new country, learning the language and making enough money to support your family is difficult.
The Maine Department of Labor looked at the employment data five years after Somali immigrants arrived in Lewiston-Auburn in 2001. By 2006, only half of working-age Somalis had worked at all. Many of those jobs were seasonal and low wage.
Excellent questions that are NEVER answered:
Before providing work permits to a new population of asylees, we need more data. How long does it take most refugees to make enough in wages to support their families without taxpayer programs? Will Portland’s applicants remain when they get refugee status? Or will they move to cities with better wages and larger populations of their compatriots? Do they have the skills our employers need?
[….]
When politicians provide foreign workers to employers that don’t pay a livable wage, then taxpayers will eventually subsidize the employee with public programs. It would be better to require employers to recruit Americans.
Now here comes the ticking time bomb that no one wants to talk about—what is going to happen to all of the low-skilled workers we have admitted (and continue to admit) by the millions as the automation monster rears its ugly head?
And we might ponder the future. A recent McKinsey study is projecting that automation will replace nearly half of the American workforce by 2055.Walmart already uses robots to stock shelves, and McKinsey predicts that automation will sweep the economy. Let’s slow down, and think this one through.
And, of course the refugee industry as represented by the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights cabal (TIRRC) is steaming!
By the way, this legislation is a possible model for you in states where your Republican governor has caved to the Open Borders Left and said yes to more refugees for your state. Of course it could only work in states where the legislature has a Republican majority with some guts.
First here is the news, then we’ll learn a bit more about TIRRCwhich has 6 paid lobbyists included in a staff of 14 while those organizing grassroots on the side of restraining more migration, in pockets of resistance, must do so with no funding support.
Tennessee committee advances bill seeking to halt refugee resettlement
NASHVILLE, Tenn.–The Tennessee Immigrant & Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC) is calling a Tennessee House of Representatives bill recommended for passage “hateful.”
TIRRC says Rep. Weaver is appealing to “hateful” voters with her bill.
HJR 741 targets state funds used to resettle refugees as part of a federal program which allows states to opt-in to accept refugee resettlement.
Under the bill originally filed by Rep. Teri Lynn Weaver (R-Lancaster), HJR 741 calls for no action to be taken by Governor Bill Lee when it comes to resettlement unless authorized by a joint resolution of the General Assembly.
The bill targets Governor Lee due to his decision to continue to accept refugees in the state in response to an Executive Order issued by President Donald J. Trump last year. President Trump had issued the “Enhancing State and Local Involvement in Refugee Resettlement” order in September.
Under the Executive Order, the Federal Government would only be able to resettle refugees in specific areas where state and local governments agree to accept refugees.
However, the decision is ultimately in the hands of each state’s governor and Lee made the decision to continue participation.
Rep. Weaver’s resolution says Governor Lee’s decision obligates public money “in violation of the Tennessee General Assembly’s constitutional duty.” The resolution was recommended for passage on Tuesday by the Departments & Agencies Subcommittee.
TIRRC is calling the advancement part of a “classic hateful playbook.” TIRRC Votes Police and Legislative Affairs Manager Judith Clerjeune issued the following statement in response to the resolution…
A few days ago Tennessee’s Dailyrollcallreported on TIRRC and its fellow travelers that include the Koch’s Americans for Prosperity!
Tennessee Elected Officials – is it the Tenth or TIRRC For You?
Republican governors, like Tennessee’s Bill Lee, have given up any pretense of caring about the Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution by allowing the federal government to dictate how Tennesseans will spend their tax dollars.
TN Immigrant & Refugee Rights Coalition’s political arm called TIRRC VOTES, has SIX paid lobbyists. TIRRC itself has 14 on staff, Soros money and is running multiple email disinformation campaigns on refugee resettlement, targeting state legislators, local county commissioners and any other locally elected official.
At it’s core, TIRRC’s agenda aligns with that of the New American Economy (NAE, formerly named the Partnership for a New American Economy) outfit, along with the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity (AFP), two big dollar organizations mobilized to push more legal and illegal immigrants into communities. Like TIRRC, NAE and AFP are pushing back on key Trump immigration policies intended to help American citizens prosper.
NAE, AFP and TIRRC like to push the false economic-enhancing narrative of legal immigrants like refugees and illegal aliens. TIRRC also thinks name-calling like xenophobe, racist and hater, is an effective tool to silence anyone who disagrees with their agenda.
While TIRRC’s coalition member the American Muslim Advisory Council (AMAC) parades refugees turned Tennesseans, NAE puts out reports claiming that after living in the U.S. between 16-25 years, refugees are earn “well above the income of refugees who have been here for five years or less.” They also claim that refugees are the answer to reviving aging and declining communities.
TIRRC parrots these same points trying to deflect from the Tennessee issues. With regard to the federal refugee program, Tennessee legislators and advocates have raised the core Constitutional issue of federalism on the one hand, and the role of the state’s legislature to appropriate public money, on the other.
On these important state issues, it appears that Governor Lee has aligned himself lock, stock and barrel with TIRRC as opposed to advocating for the state’s Tenth Amendment rights and Tennessee’s Constitutional powers and duties.
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Now here comes the ticking time bomb that no one wants to talk about—what is going to happen to all of the low-skilled workers we have admitted (and continue to admit) by the millions as the automation monster rears its ugly head?
